Re: A couple of errors, a question, and a suggestion

On Sat, 20 Sep 1997, MegaZone wrote:

> Page 103-104 - width def:
It would be most helpful to me if you could give the section number
and title, so I can find the thing you are referring to online, as I
don't have a hardcopy of the spec with me.

Thanks for spotting *0 this is indeed a typo and should be 0*.


> In the long table code sample on page 111 you sometimes fill in all of
> the columns by putting in empty cells (<TD></TD>), but sometimes you do 
> not...  Oh, let me go find it online to make it easy. :-)

> Now, I know that on the two short rows it will be filled in by the
> UA.  But my concern is with novices who are reading this, and who
> tend to put weight on any inconsitency as 'meaning something'. 
> I'd either fill them all in to 5 columns total, or don't bother
> with the dummy cells. 

Thanks for spotting this inconsistent style. You presumably guessed
that the table was created by hand. I will follow your suggestion
and pad out all rows fully.
 
> Question:
> 
> Both COLGROUP and COL have a 'span' attribute.  I see that COL's
> span has a special value of '0' which mwans to span the remaining
> columns.  Yet it does not appear that COLGROUPS's span has the
> same special value.  Is this an oversight, or is it deliberate? 

I think this is an oversight dating back to 1995 when we were
working on tables in the IETF, work which led to RFC 1942.
I don't want to change this now as this would cause problems
for current implementations.

> Suggestion.  For consistency, can the special value be changed to
> 0* to match width's 0* and i*?  You know people are going to get
> them confused with two attributes on the same element with special
> values so close to being the same. 

An interesting idea, a shame we didn't think of this in 1995.
However, I am not free to change this as it may break current
implementations. span is formally defined as NUMBER and adding
"*" as a suffix may cause problems. I will ask the HTML working
group if this would indeed be problematic.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Monday, 22 September 1997 07:46:18 UTC